Releasing an Album on Floppy Disk

https://www.michaelgale.dev/blog/releasing-an-album-on-floppy-disk

by edent • 2 years ago

43 26 2 years ago

eimrine• 2 years ago

Having a scull on an album cover reminds me some dissident vinil recordings made on used x-ray negatives typically with somebody's bones photographed on it.

habi• 2 years ago

- https://www.x-rayaudio.com/

- https://youtu.be/XMCCYnDvpJQ

cstone• 2 years ago

Cool! There are also folks on Bandcamp who have floppy releases as a thing. Here's one: https://powerlunch.bandcamp.com/merch

omoikane• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534616 - The floppy disk music scene (2024-02-28)

al_borland• 2 years ago

The last time I put music on a floppy disk was 20 years ago, trying to get a single mp3 off an old Windows 95 computer with no USB or network support. I had to use WinRAR to split the file up across multiple disks, move it to a more modern system, and stitch it back together. It worked, if I never wanted to use another floppy disk after that. I wasn’t completely successful, but that’s due to work stuff that couldn’t ve avoided, and was far less annoying.

I will have to pass the floppy disk music scene. The idea brings back annoying memories.

robbiep• 2 years ago

Haha the same with me. 4 trips for Jack and Dianne

ale422• 2 years ago

Same here! In 1997 or so, I was so excited that I could put a 1-minute track on a floppy and play it back in real time...

berkes• 2 years ago

Napster on the uni network. Then split the mp3 over three floppies. Cycle home, read in the floppies, find out one disk is borked. Cycle back to uni. Put the slice on another disk. Cycle back. Finally, done. One song copied. Eleven to go for the full album. For free! :)

maitola• 2 years ago

Upvote just for the title and idea

rob74• 2 years ago

Now I wonder how much music you could fit on a floppy if you recorded the analog signal? A double-sided floppy drive would be perfect for stereo, one side for each channel. Maybe use a spiral track like on CDs instead of the usual concentric tracks? But of course that would require custom-made (or heavily modified) floppy drives, and it would sound about the same as a cassette.

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

OT loved disc magazines of the 80s

bux93• 2 years ago

Music disks used to be a thing in the 90's demo scene.

Like this 111 KB rendition of "Axel F" they did not sound like crap. https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

ale422• 2 years ago

... for 10 minutes of music! You can't do everything with them, but module files are awesome for some kinds of music...

simonjgreen• 2 years ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mjAivlc2L_k For convenience!

bananaboy• 2 years ago

They’re still a thing! I wrote the code for this recent MS-DOS release! https://remute.bandcamp.com/album/drive-into-the-future-ms-d...

larme• 2 years ago

Not the same but there's a netlabel called 20kbps[0]. Most of their albums are mp3s around 10-20 MB in total.

[0] https://20kbps.net/index2.htm

bitwize• 2 years ago

Funny this should come out a day or two after I downloaded and played Alcatraz's "Memorial Songs" musicdisk (actually 2 disks, featuring tunes by Lizardking, who was pretty much the Brian Eno of the demoscene): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mskWhgAVM

goodburb2• 2 years ago

Using TSAC should render a much higher quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975331

goodburb2• 2 years ago

-10 points, hmm...

levidos• 2 years ago

You can release them as midi files, those would easily fit on a floppy..

m_st• 2 years ago

I have great memories of downloading MIDI files found with Altavista, Yahoo or even something like midi.com, then putting them on a floppy and have them play back on my Technics KN-2000 keyboard. Then MP3 happened.

ahartmetz• 2 years ago

I'm disappointed that they didn't use DMF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format to get about 17% more space for higher, uh, "quality".

DMF was on HN a couple of weeks ago or so, but I can't find it.

lagniappe• 2 years ago

I will add the music is really catchy.

edit: I Am Not Afraid samples what is imo the best hold-music of all time at the end. nice touch ;)

justsomehnguy2• 2 years ago

My final diskettes will contain a single song, so the first thing I need to do is glue these 10 songs together into one. In other words, I need to concatenate them.
To do that I'll use ffmpeg, a free and open source audio and video encoding suite.
Superuser user, evilsoup, explains very clearly how to concatenate files using ffmpeg.

... or you can just issue

    copy input1.wav+input2.wav+input3.wav+input4.wav output.wav

voidUpdate• 2 years ago

Does that actually work? Won't it interpret the header data of all the files after input1 as samples, so you'll get a screech between each track?

justsomehnguy2• 2 years ago

The header length is 44 bytes.

1 second of 16-bit signed PCM is 88244 bytes at 44Khz.

44 / 88244 * 100 = 0.049

So it's extremely short, but on the default 16-bit PCM encoding it's an annoying click.

Not sure if the author workflow allows to save/export the raw data.

Releasing an Album on Floppy Disk

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